The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. – Thomas Merton
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. – Thomas Merton
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. – Thomas Merton
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for finding himself. If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. – Thomas Merton
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. – Shirley Chisholm